"DOA Products" And The Teams That Make Them

"Who asked for this?"

One of the most fundamental questions in design and development or any product or process stays open. It was true for the Ford Edsel and it's true for your team's activities.

Yes, the number one question your executive leadership asks is whether we're 'safe.' Yes, AI is changing the rules. (Well, some of them.) Yes, you can do "more" with AI than you could do in the past.

Who asked for this?

One of the key functions of leadership is to identify customer needs and then align work processes to meet or exceed those needs, typically by organizing teams to accomplish more than in the past. A significant challenge in an AI-oriented environment, especially when AI-leveraging gangs are attacking constantly, is to create more products as a way to satisfy the AI itch while anticipating novel demands. 

The problem is, as Rich Mironov recently put it, you're creating "DOA products."

According to Rich, implementation of AI-based coding has created a spew of material that people try to pass off as product. Code is not product, and moreover, neither code nor product matter if it doesn't respond to what the client needs or wants.

Much like the Edsel, it is DOA.

Rich builds it out more. Being able to provide more code does not equate to you're providing better code, and it does not equate to your client having more budget to pay for your code, and it does not equate to your client having more attention span to review and appreciate your code.

Your coding capacity scale with AI while your client's capacity stays the same. You lose.

This is another example of how technology products may not solve your client's business needs. Both technology and business needs are very practical, but in critically different ways. Your strategy as a leader is to understand the need, then get support for the solution, then get your people to build the solution.

Or, you could go the way of the DOA Edsel.

Ask us how you can fashion the right cybersecurity business alignment message for your customers.

(image credit: MercurySable99, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)